Revamped Hill Climb rankings

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Sunday, 12th September 2021

Revamped Hill Climb rankings.

I`ve been in discussion with Chris Myhill, James Scrivener and Nicholas Latimer about using the Spindata hill climb rankings for seeding the National Hill Climb.

If you look at the FAQ entitled Hill Climb Rankings you will see how Spindata has been doing it up to now.

It was felt that this was not ideal for this purpose as it`s hard to get 3 rides anyway and if you get more than 3 you don't want to loose your best score. My rules about losing best and worst were simply a decision I came to 2 years ago when adding hill climbs to the system, derived from how we process TTs.

Spindata is developed entirely for the riders and so it should reflect your needs. As we are a small team (two), we have the ability to make swift changes with minimal consultation. 

So from this Wednesday everyone will get a score based on the average of their 3 best rides of the year. If you ride more than 3 rides you can improve your score if your new ride's points are better than any of your 3 best so far, so its worth riding more events, but you wont be penalised if you don't do so well.

I believe the National selection will give precedence to "completed" riders (ie 3 rides) so if you are still provisional you`ve got everything to gain by riding more events and if you have "completed" don't be put off entering events which don't suit you so well.

Also I believe some riders have been looking for events with small fields so they can do well. This isn't how Spindata works and furthermore if an event doesn't have at least 10 riders of known ability it won't get processed so won't help you amass the required points. For the newbies, we give points based entirely on your time compared to other riders of known ability so the course and conditions have absolutely no objective effect on your points.

There will no longer be a "frequent" rider status for Hill Climbs but riders "categories" eg B16 will still be based on 12 months worth of hill climbs so won't necessarily reflect the current ranking.

Any concerns or questions, feel free to email us or respond on social media.

Are we getting faster

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Sunday, 29th August 2021

Are we getting faster?

A few people have challenged me this year, suggesting that the predictions are not as accurate as they might be and I wondered if this had any validity.

I`d been thinking for some time that I might need to make some adjustment for time trailing's general progression - you might expect riders are faster now than they were 2 or 3 years ago. Its certain they are faster than 10 years ago, just look back at all the records.

The rankings themselves are validated by everyone else so they wont be affected by this - if everyone gets better your ranking within the group will still be the same. However predictions are based on past performance on the course for a given ranking so should change with the times.

Here`s what I found.

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